Quote - That's true, however, some of the information being tossed around gives the impression that it's not necessary

I never stated anything like that and if you have a reference to material that I wrote that says that you don't need prior knowledge of materials and lighting to use Reality I will gladly change it. But I'm quite sure that I never, ever said that you don't need to understand lighting, quite the opposite actually. That is why I spend a few lessons of my "Make Your Own Reality" tutorial on teaching lighting and photography techniques. If you look at the text of the Reality page on my site it says "Gain access to the extraordinary power of LuxRender with an ease of use and flexibility that is unparalleled."

I feel that that is an accurate description. When it comes to accessing the power of LuxRender, Reality provides the easiest solution in the market. All the other Lux exporters that I have tried are much more technical and require the knowledge of technical jargon like "Surface Integrators", "Pixel sampler" etc. Reality simplifies all that by shielding the user from the technicalities of Lux and it provides a UI that I feel is much more intuitive than the ones shown by other Lux exporters.

Quote - I personally believe it should be stated clearly that this is not a beginner Poser product, and suggesting you can get a render "from start to finish in 18 minutes" is ludicrous and misleading.

While my reference to the dino render was inaccurate, and I apologize for that mistake, I have made several renders in tha past that were in that range. The following video demonstrates it:

http://youtu.be/CDs-siVyyXA

In less than two minutes the render is almost finished. Another minute and it would be good to go. Certainly there are times when a render takes much more time than that. I never claimed otherwise. Like any tool LuxRender can be used with different degrees of complexity. Some images require more time than others. My approach to this has been always about quality. That is why I named my plug-in "Reality". The emphasis is about achieving realism. I always loved when an image that I create is nearly indistinguidshable from a photo. That is my aim, my goal. So, when it comes to that, VRay, Maxwell or LuxRender take their time. But I find the workflow based on Reality and LuxRender to be more pleasant, more predictable and more accurate than using any other biased renderer. 

Of course, since the rendering happens in an external program, LuxRender, even if that process takes time Poser is not blocked by that so you can continue working on other scenes or creating new figures while the render runs in the background.

All the best.

Paolo

https://www.preta3d.com
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